Multi-disciplinarity vs. Scientism of STEM Only Education–Why We Need the Humanities

Increasingly, development agencies assert that technologically sound, engineering-based projects are failing because they don’t take sufficient account of the cultural context. These projects, in concept, design and implementation, lack the human perspective that recognises that no global issue, developmental problem or socio-economic challenge can be fully understood, let alone resolved, without real evidence of how the local community and the rest of humanity are experiencing it.

In this emerging exchange between the humanities as a discipline and needs of societies for development, security, prosperity and employability, academics need to re-position themselves in the world and look back at their academies.

Then they will see that the world is not constituted of ring-fenced elements of Stem, social sciences and liberal arts. God did not create chemistry on the first day, social anthropology on the second, and area studies on the third. The world was and is created of light, form, time, materiality, biological life and human experience. And the challenges it presents us with will be belittled and traduced unless we respond with appropriately holistic and multifarious solutions.

The varying disciplines into which we have conveniently siloed our world must find collaboration in a new interdisciplinarity.

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